A blog about video games and not much else. Updates at intervals of time.

Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Exploration in Video Games

This is a topic that has been on my mind a fair bit
lately, and I had previously mentioned I might go into while discussing 3D platformers. Video games have a lot of potential as a completely
unique medium to do things that books, television and movies never could. Of
course I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with games doing the
same things that other mediums do, like using text or cinematics. But as an
interactive form of media games have access to some unique things that only
they can do, and among those is the ability to explore.

Even if Deus Ex: Human
Revolution was a movie, you still could see this cool shot of the city of
Hengsha. But you couldn’t then explore
the city at your own pace.

Movies and books may be able to show all sorts of side
details and interesting aspects to the world that help flesh it out or reveal
new information, but they always have to be directed by the creator. There’s no
way to go off the rails of a story if it’s a linear experience, but when
interactivity comes in you can simply present the audience with a world and let
them go nuts. Games are in a unique position to more accurately exhibit the
feeling of free will and exploration more than any other, and it’s one of the
reasons I love them. It’s also one of the reasons some of gaming’s more recent
AAA titles haven’t enthralled me as much.

Exploring the Decline of Exploration

This is mostly overview from my 3D platformer article,
but I feel it’s worth going over again. In recent years I believe gaming has
seen a fair bit of increase in the number of linear games released. A lot of
games are shorter in general, but even when they’re fairly long they tend to be
completely linear. Games may have collection elements, or reasons to replay
stages again, but those stages themselves are still fairly unyielding affairs.
Depending on the game the rails may be masked to a varying degree, but most
tend to be a straight path to funnel the player from point A to point B.

When your game is more
linear than a rail shooter, it’s a potential problem

Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t have anything against a
game being linear. Some of my best friends, er, that is some of my favorite
games are linear. I have a great love of platformers both 2D and 3D, and have
happily been playing through some of the stellar examples of the former we’ve
had lately. Final Fantasy X might be my favorite game in the series, and it’s a
fairly linear entry in a usually more non-linear franchise (don’t worry, I’ll
definitely write more about Final Fantasy in the future). The thing is that
though I love plenty of linear games I think we’ve had a bit of a drought of
the other kind lately.

There are some easily defined reasons why, but most of
them all come down to the cost of making a high-profile game these days.
Namely, that this cost is a lot. At the dawn of gaming a single programmer
could handle absolutely every aspect of a game, and in a relatively short time
span as well. In later years the size of the teams increased, and probably for
the better people started specializing in things other than writing code. These
days it can take over 100 people working full time jobs for years just to make
a linear experience of 6 to 8 hours. When dozens of people are working for
months on a section of content, you don’t want to make that segment optional
(especially when people are complaining about how short games are getting). The
amount of work and money went into it no doubt compels developers to put
everything they make on display. This is unfortunate, because the freedom
inherent in games is one of its greatest strengths.

Explorawesome

So let me go over in a bit more detail why I think
exploration in games is an amazing thing that we need more of. To do this, I’m
going to compare two games in the Legend of Zelda series. The Legend of Zelda:
Skyward Sword is the most recent game in the series. It was a good game but not
my favorites when compared to some of its predecessors, which take places as
some of my favorite games of all time, and I think I know why. Prior to the
game coming out I read multiple previews for it in which it was noted that the
team was trying a shift in gameplay out. Zelda games typically have large open
“overworld” segments that are separated by dungeons. The games fall into a
pattern of dungeons offering most of the fighting and puzzle solving, then the
overworld being a break in between where you can explore until you find the
next dungeon. In those aforementioned previews it was noted that the
development team of Skyward Sword wanted to make the overworld segments more
like the dungeons. You can probably see where this is going.

If you answered “a
super non-linear game that this writer was very happy with” you may have some trouble identifying
subtext.

When the development team said they wanted to make the
overworld more like the dungeons, they meant they wanted them to be filled with
action and puzzles and interesting things. But the double-edged sword to this
approach is that this made them inherently more linear and less intriguing to
explore. (It also made the games excessive recycling of environments less
palatable, but that’s a story for another time). The open areas in the previous
games weren’t some fat to be trimmed leaving only tender meat, they were a
different type of equally engaging but differently paced gameplay that meshed
well alternating with the more linear dungeons.

The lack of this in
Skyward Sword may, oddly enough, make it debatably more linear than the Zelda
game where you were on actual rails

Take this compared to a previous game I’ve been playing
through recently, The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. I’ll probably do a larger
review on the game before too long, because it’s quirky and though this leaves
it with some problems it also has some really unique aspects to it that I’ve
seen few games replicate. One of these aspects is the sheer amount of the game
that’s focused on side quests. The game only features 4 main dungeons, whereas
most games in the Zelda series has somewhere between 6 and 9. However, the game
has what is quite possibly the most optional content of any Zelda game.

Between the 52 heart pieces, the 24 magical masks (17 of
which are completely optional to obtain), the 6 empty bottles, the 20 people
with problems listed in the Bombers’ Notebook, the Skulltula Houses, upgrading
your arrows, bombs, sword and other equipment, and a plethora of smaller
things, this game has an absolutely ridiculous wealth of things to do that you
could play through the game and never see. On one hand, this makes the main
game fairly short. But on the other hand, it feels more like a complete and
interesting world than most other games I know of, and exploring it is fun. The world and characters that
inhabit it are given a depth by the amount of things they’re involved in, and
this can immerse you in the setting more than anything else.

It isn’t just pre-determined side quests that do this
either. Creating a world with tons of side quests certainly helps make the world a fun place to
explore, but the little things make a difference as well; the things that
aren’t really quests so much as curiosities in the game world that you can
discuss with your friends. Did you know that if you manage to stand on top of
the drawbridge of Hyrule Market as it raises in Zelda: Ocarina of Time it will
reward you with a red rupee? Were you aware in the same game that if you bomb a
Gossip Stone it will blink off a countdown before rocketing into the sky,
exploding if it hits a ceiling? Did you know that the clock stage in Super
Mario 64 changes based on the time you enter it? Have you seen the secret cow
level?

What, you thought I
was kidding about the Gossip Stones?

I could
go on forever about the various side quests, hidden areas, easter eggs and so
forth from various games, but the point is that these little things all come
together to make the world feel complete. Sometimes these secrets are some of
the most memorable things about the game, something you’ll remember for years
to come. But even if there is no crazy secret to be rewarded to players if they
walk off the beaten path, even if the only reward is a part of the world you’ve
never seen before, exploration in and of itself can still be rewarding. It
satiates human curiosity and desire for adventure, and allows players to feel
true control over their character, immersing them in the world. Of course, don’t
take that statement the wrong way, just because exploration in and of itself can be rewarding and interesting doesn’t
mean it always is.

Evoking Effective vs Egregious Exploration

Exploration, like almost all things, has good and bad
methods of delivery. Plenty of games have a world that’s intended to be fun to
explore but has the sensation lessened for some reason. Exploration for its own
sake is mildly interesting, but unless the world it takes place in is astoundingly
pretty you’re probably going to want some
type of reward or payoff to it. Perhaps you can simply find a really nice
looking hidden area, perhaps you can find people to talk to or writings that
flesh out the backstory of the world, and perhaps you could go with the easiest
and often most effective staple of actual items and upgrades relevant to the
rest of the gameplay. But the problem with most of these is they take a fair
amount of effort to do. Modeling new areas, creating new NPCs and adding new
items or optional gameplay upgrades all takes a fair amount of work, time and
budget these days. So the challenge a lot of games have is making the most of a
limited sized world, and some screw this up by taking the easy way out. Exploration
does not equal fetch quest or collectible.

When I
listed some interesting examples of exploration a while back, none of them
involved grind. “Grind” is a gaming term often used to describe online games
such as World Of Warcraft, and here describes a scenario where the player
performs a repetitive, possibly un-engaging task in order to progress or gain
optional upgrades. It’s easy to make filler gameplay, and although sometimes it
might be necessary in small amounts to keep games budgets in line it’s rarely a
positive and should be avoided as much as possible.

Though its gameplay is
often filled with grind, I actually think WoW is a decent world to explore. The
areas are diverse and colorful and they fill the game with easter eggs.

However I
should mention now, collectibles in games aren’t always a bad thing, even if
they have no effect on gameplay whatsoever. If those collectibles are
completely optional then even if they aren’t really adding much to the game I
can’t imagine them hurting it. If collectibles add something to the game other
than getting a bar to 100% then they’ll almost certainly be a positive point in
its favor. (Although you might disappoint some people if there’s a
disproportionate amount of work needed to obtain what is revealed to be a
crummy reward. Like concept art. Looks guys, I know it’s easy to add, but
please, if it takes several hours or more to acquire all the unlockables in
your game, please give us something more than concept art.)

Oh boy, a two
dimensional drawing of something I’ve already seen in the game! One I could’ve
just looked up on the internet! This certainly validates my hours of toil! (To
be fair to the game in question, Sonic Generations gave you plenty of other,
better unlockables as well)

So if
collectibles are either inoffensive or a good thing, why am I against them?
Well I’m not against optional collectibles existing really, what I’m against is
them existing instead of the more
interesting forms of exploration. I shall again use the example of Zelda:
Skyward Sword. In Skyward Sword they experimented with a new mechanic wherein
you could upgrade a large portion of your equipment by giving some materials
and some cash to a blacksmith. You could find the rarer materials in chests but
mostly found them dropped from slain monsters. Taken on its own, this is a fine
feature that adds some depth to the game without much effort, and I’d rather
have it than nothing. But the key thing to note here is that this replaced the mechanic the old Zelda
games had where all your equipment could be upgraded in different ways by doing
distinct things. Getting a high score at the shooting gallery earned you a
larger quiver for arrows, saving the old lady who runs the bomb shop from a
thief would allow you to buy a bigger bomb bag, etc. Whereas before unique,
interesting and separate events in the world got you upgrades, now it all comes
down to a pre-determined grind. This point transitions nicely into another
about exploration: the size of the world doesn’t equal the depth of the world.

When I
was kid first playing Zelda: Ocarina of Time, the location of Hyrule Field
seemed huge. Given that I hadn’t played many games before it I wasn’t absolutely
amazed or anything, but it seemed pretty big. In actuality, once you get the
horse you can ride across it in a minute or two (walking would probably still
only take three or four). The Legend of Zelda games are certainly reasonably
sized, but they really aren’t enormous. Yet they feel like large, complete
worlds to explore because they make what real estate they do have count,
packing it with secrets and things to do. I don’t doubt that if you took the
entire overworld of Ocarina of Time or Majora’s Mask and measured the amount of
space it takes up, it would be something like one or two stages of Call of Duty
or a similar linear shooter. The entire campaign of Call of Duty: Modern
Warfare 2 supposedly took 5 to 8 hours or so to complete, and yet these games
that could contain anywhere from 20 to 50 hours of content (depending on
optional things) are arguably quite smaller.

The
difference is in how the world is used. In your standard Call of Duty styled
shooter (as well as many other kinds of games today), you’re often tearing
through the stages at high speeds. You speed by on a snowmobile, run through a
building, street or boat, and generally move very quickly through areas where a
lot is happening. These games make less efficient use of scenery than freakin’
3D Sonic the Hedgehog stages, blowing past tons of events that would be the
climax of a more reserved game in minutes. Despite the fact that I could run a
lap around Majora’s Mask’s Termina Field in several minutes, it contained something
like a dozen secret grottos and even more miscellaneous secrets, easter eggs
and points of interest.

This is a map showing
the optional points of interests for just 1/4th of Termina Field.
You can barely walk 10 feet without passing by something notable.

Closing Statements

I
understand that this type of thing probably has less of a place in a modern
shooter like Call of Duty, and I’m perfectly fine with some of these cinematic
style games existing. But the amount of games you can explore in a satisfying
way seems to have decreased a bit lately, and it wasn’t very large to begin
with. If you’re wondering why I bring up Zelda so much, apart from it being one
of my favorite game series ever, it’s because it’s one of the very few game
series I know of that consistently has really strong explorative elements. Such
games are far and few between.

Beyond Good and Evil,
Okami and Darksiders are the only games I can currently think of that I’ve
heard described as Zelda-esque.

But that
doesn’t mean that I need every game to focus
on exploration. I’m not asking every game to cram a million optional side areas
everywhere or make a huge open world to explore. I just think that,
particularly recently in their rush to mimic cinema, video games, even linear
ones, could benefit from some of the advantages that a little exploration
brings. Just making levels a bit more open and non-linear, even if they’re
still ultimately from point A to B, makes your actions feel more your own and
the world feel more complete. I don’t care if the games are a bit uglier, or glitchier,
or don’t always flow exactly right. If it means I get some personal freedom and
chance for exploration, I think it’s worth it.

There is
no other medium where one can personally explore an entire fictional world
built just for them. The feeling of wonder in discovering something that was
always there but you never noticed, the feeling of venturing out into the great
unknown just to see what’s there, and the feeling of being immersed in a
faraway place with tons of interesting things to do and see, these are feelings
that games have the potential to accomplish better than anyone else. In light
of this, I think it’s just a bit odd how many games place you on a tightly
restricted path from one end to the other.

2 comments:

damm i agree completly, i remember playing super mairo 64 and even when i wasent playing a level trying to get a star, i could just explore the whole place and wander around and it was really fun. but now in other games, like i just got super mario 3d land, there really is nothin much to do after you collect all star coins and beat all the levels which are pretty much completly linear

I'm probably mostly throughish skyward sword at this point, and yeah, it is strikingly linear. I want to explore the lands myself, yet all the exploring is facilitated through plot. It's not as fun when you're supposed to explore all the nooks. And you can go to the different islands, but the chest mechanic makes the reward of exploring difficult.